It depends on the context. There’s a world of difference between mocking people’s religion on the internet to mocking religions with other non-religious people to mocking people’s religion to their faces, in real life, to mocking people’s religion in a book, or as an address, or so on.
Some of them are play, some of them are serious discourse, some of them are unquestionably rude.
P.S. When you refuse to respect our beliefs, we tend not to respect yours as much. And don’t give me the line about how you respect the people and so on. When you say things like this:
That reveals your true sentiment.
Since St. Richard of Dawkins got really, truly overexposed and preachy about it.
[/Joke]
I’ll be honest - my natural inclination whenever I hear anyone talking about their religious beliefs, is to shout “STFU! Your beliefs are your beliefs. Now keep them to your fucking self, because they are about as relevant to me as the sex lives of Hobbits!”.
But, because I strive to be civil and tolerant, I merely tune out the bollocks, and hopefully nod my head in the right places.
I don’t know why it is, but I really get annoyed at people who identify themselves by their religion. “I’m an Xtian.”, “I’m a Jew.”, "I’m a Muslim. "… no you’re not - you are fucking human beings, with the same basic wants and needs as every other one of them on this planet, and any belief that excludes others based on the writings of people who were nigh on primitive in their thoughts, is worthy of no respect from me.
Yes, can’t you tell - I’m full of the festive spirit.
Congratulations- you’ve made your first steps in self-realization! Yeah, it’s exactly what I thought, Hinduism is a HUGE rabbit’s hole of intricate ideas, thoughts, and philosophies merged into a diverse culture- one person summed it up best “Almost every stance can be found advocated by SOMEONE in Hinduism, and for every one of those, there’s two more saying the exact opposite.”
I rather like it for that reason. And it’s quite roomy allowing for free thoughts and ideas- like a pair of old boxer- though as always there’s Conservatives and extremists who will say that only their idea is the TRUE and CORRECT way. That’s usually a good way to tell if they’ve got the right idea on Hinduism in my opinion. Only the Sith deal in Absolutes and all that. 
Thank you. Totally unintentional, but totally cool as I got the reference right away (one of my fav. songs too!)
That’s a pretty good summary actually. Though most Hindus consider Rama (“Ram”'s spelling- lots of silent A’s or non-silent A’s if you like your Sanskrit pronunciations- i think)- but “most” Hindus consider Rama to be one of the 12 avatars of Vishnu. And the Trinity of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva are all just facets of one God- the idea being that the Idea of God itself is so complex and unknownable currently to us, that it’s easier to break it down into smaller parts- like the many sides of a diamond. There are any number of ways to cut the diamond to show the sides of it, and to get a different reflection inside of each- each correct when viewed from their own angle- however, in the end, it is still a Diamond, or even more correctly- it’s a bunch of compressed Carbon atoms. But many cannot quite perceive that and so for some it’s easier to use the parables, metaphors, and images.
But you are quite on the ball with the concept of parables and Formless Hinduism. 
That’s actually how I pretty much view the Trinity issue actually for the Christian religion- it can be however you wish to view it- if you worship the Trinity each for what they are, then that’s what you do vs. one who states they’re one single thing with three facets to it. The problem is when we humans started adding in these absolutes and that there’s only ONE right way to know something or do something. That’s when you have these debates on is it 3 or is it 1?
I say it is what it is [to you], and it is what it needs to be [for you].
Personalize it, rationalize it if you must, and don’t worry about it so much what other people think.
What a great thread. A total lunatic christian going bananas over a single word. One word. Second Stone- you want to know why there is so much religious strife? Because you looneys can get this worked up over one silly word.
Read the following two sentences and see how you react to each of them:
Both of the these sentences, from your point of view, are equally incorrect, right? Did the first sentence raise your blood pressure? Did it make you want to open a pit thread? Was it “mocking” or “offensive”? The difference you feel when you read those sentences is what makes religion so dangerous.
Sorry for not responding sooner - I was doing far more interesting things last night.
Boobie, if was mocking your religion in that thread, you would have known it. if your reaction to an attempt at a reasoned explanation of how the Trinity and the Saints had roots in polytheism is crying, you might want to stay out of GD. You could actually argue against it like some other believers did.
My opinion comes from my Jewish side, not my atheist side. We brought an ivory Virgin Mary back with us from Africa for a Catholic friend (back when it was legal) and our Kohen down the street scratched its nose to show it was not being used as an idol. So that was one very devout Jew who saw the similarity of Mary worship to polytheism.
I will mock your ignorance of Godel. He did not show that no theorem could be proved, just that there was no system in which all theorems can be proved. I got to go through his proof of this in detail in college, as well as the similar proof by Turing of the Halting problem. So, mock mock
And in hyperbolic geometry, it’s possible to have two discrete points, the distance between which is zero, at the circle at infinity.
I’m as atheistic as anyone you’ll ever meet, but it’s obvious that you guys are trying to compare incomparable paradigms.
I think Judaism’s polytheistic roots are very evident. When I went to shul, the rabbi never, ever mentioned Satan, so among my type of Conservatives at least he was kind of an embarrassment from the past, and not the active presence he is in some forms of Christianity. We also did not learn complex theological edifices to explain him away. It never came up, really but I think the explanation would have been was that Job was just a story. He doesn’t actually show up in Genesis either. God’s sons do, but they were never mentioned. It was quite exciting to come upon them when I read the whole Bible.
My point, lest it get lost in the shuffle, is that it’s entirely possible to posit and prove the existence of contexts which contain circumstances that make absolutely no sense in the paradigm we’re accustomed to occupying. That’s what religion is, and why “one plus one plus one” doe NOT necessarily equal three.
That’s true, but without extraordinary evidence the hypothesis that these circumstances (I looked hard for the noun in that sentence - have you ever considered writing for post-modernist journals ) are bushwa must be considered also. Relativity and quantum mechanics make as little sense to our everyday minds, which is why it is important that their predictions be (and have been) confirmed to a great degree of accuracy.
Could you elaborate on this anecdote?
I declare Pit Thread Backfire.
Oh, I’m not saying I believe anything about Christianity, or even about religion at large. I’m just saying that it’s not necessarily valid to reinterpret their extraordinary claims in terms of everyday (planar, Euclidean, if you will) logic, and that “one plus one plus one equals three” is not even necessarily true in all contexts we HAVE described, so it’s unhelpful to make that claim in a context which, by its very nature, describes the ultimate multidimensional topology.
I swear I’m not trying to intentionally be post-modernist or obscure. I think I’ve been diving too deeply into Riemannian geometry recently.
What, exactly, could possibly be offensive about a characterization of Christianity (or any religion) as polytheistic?
Are you suggesting that monotheism is inherently better than polytheism?
You could use this exact post over on the Mornington Crescent thread.
This is the most thoughtful and erudite pit thread I’ve read in a while, so the OP should get unintentional kudos for that, at least.
Yep, good ol’ Genesis 6:1-4.
The sons of God had children with mortal women… demi-gods (per Greek etc myth).
The sons of God. Mono-what?
Christainity has lots of gods that it likes to pretend aren’t gods, but that don’t fool the rest of us.
I’ve been confused about that this whole thread. Polytheism is apparently the religious equivalent of getting a D from the health inspector. Which you have to post in a visible area.
Quite seriously, the offense probably comes from the fact that it’s percieved as an insult against his One True God. That is, if anyone else is a god too, that makes God less awesome. (Especially if that person is that scumbag Jesus.) To say that the religion is polytheistic is viewed as saying that God has equals - just the way that in all other pantheons, all the gods in them were exactly equal in power and prestige. So when we point out the the religion is, in the bible and in practice, overtly polytheistic, he takes it as a slight against his God.
It’s my experience that a lot of theists take perceived slights against their dieties very personally.